1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to call distribution in a communications network, in particular for telemarketing services.
2. Related Art
Telemarketing services involve, for example, a retailer operating a call answering centre in which a number of call answering agents take calls from customers. Large call answering centres may be split over several sites and may employ some hundreds of call answering agents. Typically, customers dial a single number, which may be charged at a particular rate, for example, the rate applicable to a local call, and each call is automatically directed within the network to an appropriate one of the sites, and subsequently to one of the call answering agents within the site. The system which is responsible for distributing the calls between different sites may use a call plan. A call plan comprises a decision tree which is pre-programmed with criteria to be used in selecting a destination. For example, one criterion might be the time of day at which the call is made, with out-of-hours calls all being directed to one particular site, a particular ratio of calls may be directed to different sites or calls may be directed to a particular site in dependence upon the geographical origin of the call.
Intelligent network platforms capable of providing such distribution of calls are provided by many equipment suppliers. Each equipment supplier usually provides a support system for their particular platform. Such support systems typically provide facilities such as call plan editing and reporting facilities so that a customer can monitor call completion performance, for example, and geographic mapping of calling line identities.
In order to provide all the services required by a particular customer a telecommunications operator (also referred to herein as the service provider) may provide services using a plurality of service execution platforms. The problem with this approach is that instead of having a single virtual network the customer then has to partition their virtual network into a plurality of virtual networks each associated with one of a plurality of service execution platforms. In addition to this the customer is faced with having to design several call plans using different interfaces and editors. This results in data duplication and re-entry and thus errors are likely to occur. Also reporting facilities are not integrated so the customer receives several different types of reports.